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3
CHAPTER ONE
Following
a defeat at White Hart Lane a Tottenham Hotspurs supporter ran to the Spurs dugout and threw a punch at their manager, Glen Hoddle. It was the first recorded case of the fan hitting the shit. Standing on the Lancashire/Yorkshire
border, directly on the flight path of airplanes landing at Manchester Ringway
airport, Frogley is a town of some ninety odd thousand souls (and eighty two
odd souls, who reside in the local mental hospital, but more of that later).
Someone once called it a sleepy little town, and if that is the case it is
probably because there isn't a lot there to wake up for. Nor could it ever be
accused of being pretty. Old mill towns never are, and Frogley was no
different. When the town council erected a notice 'You Are now Entering
Frogley, Please Drive Slowly' it wasn't very long before one of the more astute
residents had painted out the word 'Slowly' and replaced it with 'Quickly'. The
notice, now changed from a request to a piece of helpful advice, if somewhat
cruel, was entirely appropriate. The airplanes pass over the drab millstone grit houses at a height of about five thousand feet, and if a passenger were to look down he would be able to pick out the home of Stanley Sutton quite easily - not because it was a large house, it wasn't, it was a two-up two-down in the middle of row up on row of terraced houses- but because Stanley had painted every inch of his house in the Frogley Town Football Club colours of red, green and yellow stripes. From this height it stood out like a jewel, if not in a crown then in some gigantic grey flat cap. If, maybe due to severe turbulence over the Pennines or the pilot making a bit too merry with the duty free, the airplane had happened to be flying over Frogley at a height of five hundred feet instead of five thousand feet, and the date happened to be August the fifteenth 2002, a passenger looking down on Stanley Sutton's house might have seen Stanley serenely applying a fresh coat of paint to one of the yellow stripes on the front of his house. However one would have had to be passing the humble house on Abbatoir Street on foot to overhear the conversation which took place between Stanley and his wife Sarah Jane, when she returned from shopping and saw what Stanley was doing. |